The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

Close approach of the Moon and Jupiter

Dominic Ford, Editor
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The sky at

The Moon and Jupiter will make a close approach, passing within 4°21' of each other. The Moon will be 21 days old.

From Columbus , the pair will be visible in the dawn sky, rising at 01:43 (EST) and reaching an altitude of 34° above the south-eastern horizon before fading from view as dawn breaks at around 05:43.

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The Moon will be at mag -12.0; and Jupiter will be at mag -2.5. Both objects will lie in the constellation Aquarius.

They will be too widely separated to fit within the field of view of a telescope, but will be visible to the naked eye or through a pair of binoculars.

At around the same time, the pair will also share the same right ascension – called a conjunction.

A graph of the angular separation between the Moon and Jupiter around the time of closest approach is available here.

The positions of the pair at the moment of closest approach will be as follows:

Object Right Ascension Declination Constellation Magnitude Angular Size
The Moon 22h20m40s 15°54'S Aquarius -12.0 30'57"1
Jupiter 22h14m30s 11°49'S Aquarius -2.5 40"3

The coordinates above are given in J2000.0. The pair will be at an angular separation of 99° from the Sun, which is in Taurus at this time of year.

The sky on 1 Jun 2021

The sky on 1 June 2021
Sunrise
06:02
Sunset
20:54
Twilight ends
22:53
Twilight begins
04:03

21-day old moon
Waning Gibbous

53%

21 days old

Planets
Rise Culm. Set
Mercury 06:58 14:24 21:50
Venus 07:11 14:44 22:16
Moon 02:04 07:10 12:22
Mars 09:07 16:32 23:58
Jupiter 01:43 07:06 12:28
Saturn 00:52 05:54 10:56
All times shown in EDT.

Source

The circumstances of this event were computed using the DE430 planetary ephemeris published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

This event was automatically generated by searching the ephemeris for planetary alignments which are of interest to amateur astronomers, and the text above was generated based on an estimate of your location.

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20 Jun 2021  –  Jupiter enters retrograde motion
19 Aug 2021  –  Jupiter at opposition
18 Oct 2021  –  Jupiter ends retrograde motion

Image credit

The Moon in conjunction with Venus and Jupiter, with the Very Large Telescope in the foreground. Image © Y. Beletsky, ESO, 2009.

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Columbus

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39.96°N
83.00°W
EST

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